Hi!
Is there a cloud service that can be run in your own brand name and you can customize the user front to your language ?

Below is what I need:

I rent the cloud service from that service provider.
I can then customize the control panel, and brand in my own brand.
My client buy cloud service from my site.
Thu API I can automatically order what my clients need.
My client login and manage their cloud service.
I charge my client based on my price.

Hi, by the moment SolusVM panel dont provide a direct reseller interface, then, we need wait...

But all client accounts created with SolusVM are able use the API functions, then if you know how to create your own scripts with the API youre able to check any SolusVM partner to implement your cloud reseller infra.

King regards.

Haha, I know solusvm, but I thought it is not really "cloud", it just vps.

I know dediserve.com offer such a solution, and have a module for WHMCS and Hostbill

Haha, I know solusvm, but I thought it is not really "cloud", it just vps.

You obviously dont know the difference because VPS is just to say a virtual environment, and absolutely all clouds are virtualized. Amazon = Xen, Google = Xen, Rackspacecloud = Xen, Gigenet = Xen

So yes, most of the clouds are Xen which are virtual environments or also Virtual Private Server = VPS

The only difference is they would use SAN storage and have a metered model based on usage.

If you mean a highly resilient and clustered cloud, I only know Amazon and Google have that and maybe a few more, only the biggest ones, and you will not be able to brand them unless you are able to spend a couple thousands, make that millions probably.

High availability is a key difference.

With a VPS if the server that hosts the VPS goes down, then you don't have a VPS anymore.

If your VPS is hosted on an applogic cloud or something similar and the server that hosts your VPS goes down, then applogic automatically brings your VPS back up on a different server.

High availability is a key difference.

With a VPS if the server that hosts the VPS goes down, then you don't have a VPS anymore.

If your VPS is hosted on an applogic cloud or something similar and the server that hosts your VPS goes down, then applogic automatically brings your VPS back up on a different server.

Thats all very nice in theory but most cloud providers are just simple VPS accounts with a metered model. Maybe a fancy SAN which is a benefit or not. Example, Gigenet I tested them and in 60 days they where down several hours. Total uptime was like 90%, why? SAN problems. VPS.NET had also terrible problems with their open-e iscsi software.

Rackspace was terrible then where on the VmWare platform. They are not on Xen and it seems things are better.

Usually a SAN means a single point of failure and its not a very expensive SAN you will have more troubles then just being on a single node.

What you all forget as well is that in order to be truly HA they need to reserve your VPS environment on a second servers, which usually increases cost allot. So based on this, most they have a SAN storage and thats it, if there is a hardware problem on your node, they will not migrate you automatically no another one which would costs allot of money. They can but the cheaps ones usually dont have a second box just for your. That would mean having double hardware for almost anything.

So its all nice in papers and design but in reality only a very expensive cloud is going to get you a superb uptime and even so Amazon had downtimes as well and they are for sure the biggest and most stable of all of them.

What you also need to take into account is that most of the downtimes are actually caused by software and not hardware, so if you MySQL servers fails, or your apache crashes, a cloud is not going to help you either. From personal experience you can get this days a whole better uptime on single good servers or good VPS on very solid nodes then on the current cloud offerings. This may or not change in the future but its currently like it is. The benefits of cloud is mainly pay only for what you use and of course the scalability.

A cloud setup is not very expensive, a maybe a few thousands to start but a very solid one costs a fortune, and they are not the cheapest out. Also they will not allow branding, who would? If you spend millions on a new technology you dont want others offering it on their brand either, and its like you will have hard time selling it either. If the OP asks for branding he will only get cheap VPS clouds with a nice API on it which are more or less VPS servers.

You should go readup on applogic, owned by CA now, it's good stuff. I run a small applogic cloud and the only downtime I ever have is either network related or scheduled.

Applogic is built on Xen, it always keeps user data (VPS info) on at least 2 servers. So if 1 server dies, it just starts it up on another server.
Sure it costs a little bit more then using standalone Xen but it isn't astronomical.

A lot of the 'first generation' cloud providers don't understand the ratios and requirements of compute and storage, and how the cloud model changes everything (it removed the ability to oversell for a start).

Done correctly, with enterprise servers and SAN, the cloud is the future of all hosting services.

A lot of the 'first generation' cloud providers don't understand the ratios and requirements of compute and storage, and how the cloud model changes everything (it removed the ability to oversell for a start).

Done correctly, with enterprise servers and SAN, the cloud is the future of all hosting services.

You are so VERY right...I normally present it like this: http://ditlev.dk/snitch/2010-12-14_2044.png - cloud hosting is like only being able to fit 400 seats in a 500 seat jet. And if you are used a business plan based on shared hosting or virtuozzo based overselling, then you'll probably get a bit of a shock :)

You are so VERY right...I normally present it like this: http://ditlev.dk/snitch/2010-12-14_2044.png - cloud hosting is like only being able to fit 400 seats in a 500 seat jet. And if you are used a business plan based on shared hosting or virtuozzo based overselling, then you'll probably get a bit of a shock :)

Nice analogy, D. :)

You are exactly right. Customers also don't understand that to sell 1GB of RAM, the host really needs something like 1.2-1.5 depending on a few other factors!

All that flexibility, HA and 'clever stuff' that makes a cloud a cloud, means that, while the platform is very efficient and manageable, it simply doesn't compare apples with apples with cheap dedicated, vps or shared.

Compare 4GB of 'burstable' ram on an openvz/virtuozzo style VPS, with 4GB RAM on an onapp powered cloud for example.

The first 4GB could be literally sold to 20 other customers who will all compete for it as needed, the onapp 4GB is a fixed, allocated, 100% guaranteed amount.

If the provider has a node with 48GB of ram and they sell 45GB of VM's - then that node is 'very full'.

I love your slide though Ditlev, says what I am preaching much more eloquently :)

A lot of the 'first generation' cloud providers don't understand the ratios and requirements of compute and storage, and how the cloud model changes everything (it removed the ability to oversell for a start).

Done correctly, with enterprise servers and SAN, the cloud is the future of all hosting services.

Why is that? Virtualization exists for years now. Cloud is just clustered and metered, and well.... Google decided to promote the world "cloud" like something amazingly new and impressive. I like the CEO of Oracle when he makes fun about cloud.

Clustered services, even SAN storage has existed for years, the metered model may be somehow new. What im interested is why do you think its the future of the Internet? You mean like when Amazon the biggest cloud provider in the world, kicked WikiLeads? Imagine if there exists only 3 or 5 cloud providers in the world, we all depend on them for being hosted as opposed to now, having millions of hosting companies available which promotes competition and fairness.

Dont get me wrong, cloud is amazing, but I dont think its the future, neither its for everyone. Some people will benefit from it allot, others dont, others will find it completely useless.


Also PLEASE, PLEASE dont mention Virtuozzo when I was talking about virtualization. I dont consider Virtuozzo or OpenVZ to be virtualization at all. I consider it to be a chrooted OS, its shared hosting and nothing more. Virtuozzo is not real virtualization and its not even considered as so in the virtualization market. And this is why probably (thanks to Virtuozzo) so many customers had bad experiences with virtualization and thing the cloud is going to solve it. Because most provides using that piece of crap software oversell all resources to the point its no better then a low shared hosting environment.

I would consider Xen and Vmware to be virtualization enviroments, that virtualize the hardware truly, from inside the chip (Intel) to the storage, where normally you get fully dedicated resources. This is why we dont see Virtuozzo clouds either and I hope for the best of mankind we never see.


I dont understand that image with the jets anyway. What does that have to do with the technology? Its the provider that oversells or undersells.

I can buy the latests hottest servers in put 10 shared hosting clients on there in have a huge better performance then someone on a oversold VPS node.

The same can be said for the cloud. Actually the SAN storages can be oversold ratter very fast and quickly. The problem is that cloud providers have invested huge in hardware and resources, and they are not filled up yet. But people are not stupid. Companies want their money back. Servers running costs money and they will for sure try to fill up the resources in the best possible way. That means, you can BET on it, that there will be oversold clouds with more clients they can support. Everything can be abused, even network. Funny the image cames from someone that just did exactly that with their network and had to kick one of their major clients in order so other clients dont suffer. So I dont think its the best model for overselling-underselling either. No offense but those are facts.

There is room for lots of cloud providers.

Every datacentre, dedicated server company, shared hosting provider, VPS provider in the world right now will be running from a cloud platform in the next 3 years. It's inevitable.

Physical kit and bespoke architectures will retreat back to the high end niche it already is becoming.

In my view it is the maturation of an industry that is still only 10-15 years old (web hosting) and an inevitable on and one I invite.

My point is that with a proper cloud it's not -possible- for the host to oversell.

My point is that with a proper cloud it's not -possible- for the host to oversell.

Why not? Of course you can.

If Xen based, you can't allocate more RAM to the virtual machines than is available on the Hypervisor.

So 48GB of ram on the HV = 48x 1GB VM's (maximum).

So you cant oversell the Hypervisors.

SAN - using iSCSI / FC, xen will 'format' the drive in use and take up the space allocated to it.

Even if the provider uses thin provisioning, this isnt overselling, as you still need to provide sufficient capacity to store the data. At the moment, both vmware and xen don't really 'do' thin provisioning.

So not sure what you can 'oversell' in the traditional model of 'dump all the customers onto the server and let them 'fight' for resources' and 'sell the same GB of ram to 100 people', for example>?

and the instantaneous nature of many cloud offerings makes it a bit harder to control the density ratios.
But on top of that, and even more important in this discussion, you need to leave idle resources for scaling and failovers in your cloud. In small clouds up to 20% of your total infrastructure. Some of our large clients with 1000+ VM's still leave 5% idle for failover/scaling.

:)
D

and the instantaneous nature of many cloud offerings makes it a bit harder to control the density ratios.
But on top of that, and even more important in this discussion, you need to leave idle resources for scaling and failovers in your cloud. In small clouds up to 20% of your total infrastructure. Some of our large clients with 1000+ VM's still leave 5% idle for failover/scaling.

:)
D

Very true, we always have an extra Dell blade doing nothing just in case we have an issue with one of our existing production servers. We also don't max the memory on each blade because we've seen it affect customer's servers. We originally were using Xen and was very happy with it but more and more potential customers didn't want to go with us because they trusted VMware more.

Getting back to the original question posted on this thread. We have just launched vCloud Director from VMware but its customization is pretty limited. Basically, each of our customers is a organization and there isn't an option to upload logos,etc.. (for your customers)

I know Hosting.com has a full white label product where it's fully customizable.

If Xen based, you can't allocate more RAM to the virtual machines than is available on the Hypervisor.

So 48GB of ram on the HV = 48x 1GB VM's (maximum).

So you cant oversell the Hypervisors.

Its fairly simple and is already happening on some Xen VM. You might want to research ballooning, where the hypervisor reclaims memory from running VMs if it can.

By definition, a cloud can oversell easily.

Why is that? Virtualization exists for years now. Cloud is just clustered and metered, and well.... Google decided to promote the world "cloud" like something amazingly new and impressive. I like the CEO of Oracle when he makes fun about cloud.

Clustered services, even SAN storage has existed for years, the metered model may be somehow new. What im interested is why do you think its the future of the Internet? You mean like when Amazon the biggest cloud provider in the world, kicked WikiLeads? Imagine if there exists only 3 or 5 cloud providers in the world, we all depend on them for being hosted as opposed to now, having millions of hosting companies available which promotes competition and fairness.

Dont get me wrong, cloud is amazing, but I dont think its the future, neither its for everyone. Some people will benefit from it allot, others dont, others will find it completely useless.


Also PLEASE, PLEASE dont mention Virtuozzo when I was talking about virtualization. I dont consider Virtuozzo or OpenVZ to be virtualization at all. I consider it to be a chrooted OS, its shared hosting and nothing more. Virtuozzo is not real virtualization and its not even considered as so in the virtualization market. And this is why probably (thanks to Virtuozzo) so many customers had bad experiences with virtualization and thing the cloud is going to solve it. Because most provides using that piece of crap software oversell all resources to the point its no better then a low shared hosting environment.

I would consider Xen and Vmware to be virtualization enviroments, that virtualize the hardware truly, from inside the chip (Intel) to the storage, where normally you get fully dedicated resources. This is why we dont see Virtuozzo clouds either and I hope for the best of mankind we never see.


I dont understand that image with the jets anyway. What does that have to do with the technology? Its the provider that oversells or undersells.

I can buy the latests hottest servers in put 10 shared hosting clients on there in have a huge better performance then someone on a oversold VPS node.

The same can be said for the cloud. Actually the SAN storages can be oversold ratter very fast and quickly. The problem is that cloud providers have invested huge in hardware and resources, and they are not filled up yet. But people are not stupid. Companies want their money back. Servers running costs money and they will for sure try to fill up the resources in the best possible way. That means, you can BET on it, that there will be oversold clouds with more clients they can support. Everything can be abused, even network. Funny the image cames from someone that just did exactly that with their network and had to kick one of their major clients in order so other clients dont suffer. So I dont think its the best model for overselling-underselling either. No offense but those are facts.

I know what speech you're talking about and Larry was right it is made up of cpu, ram, storage, databases, networking, etc. It's not "vapor".. it's definitely made up of hardware. That is nothing new and most every customer we have realizes that it is running on traditional hardware. However, Larry compares and talks about Salesforce and other SaaS providers who use their own Cloud designed applications. He purposely failed to address anything about IaaS which is what most providers are benefiting from on Cloud.

Cloud is the future of the Internet. I've been around long enough to know what changes are being majorly adopted and not, this is one of them. So it's your choice on whether or not you want to be a part of it.

Why would there only be a few providers? I see so many providers starting up it's not even funny. 13 years ago when I was doing shared hosting there were less companies doing that than there are today doing Cloud. They are growing very rapidly actually, and the companies that are offering it are vastly expanding their services.

The point of overselling is it is much more rare in Cloud. Why? People are buying dedicated resources. They are buying a set amount of CPU/RAM/Network and in some cases, Disk IO. In shared, everything is oversold. Figuring Xen is by far the standard in today's Cloud hypervisor, Xen does not over-allocate when you buy Cloud built on Xen and you get X amount of CPU and X amount of RAM, it is allocated and available as dedicated resources.

Some clouds using low IO infrastructure's are the concern of that particular host. We do not suffer from that problem, nor do some others. That is not an overselling condition but an architectural design limitation and most likely a miscalculated error on the architects part. Cloud is not magic, but it is an advanced set of tools and particularly intelligent set of hardware to achieve things that otherwise could not be achieved in a traditional environment.

Taken to the next level, we have been scaling standard run of the mill applications well beyond 1 physical server in Cloud. Before Cloud, that wasn't possible for us on Virtualization alone as Virtualization has inherent limitations in the design. It needs more.. which is why Cloud is not Virtualization and Virtualization is not Cloud. Virtualization is just a component to Cloud just as an engine is a component to a car.

Its fairly simple and is already happening on some Xen VM. You might want to research ballooning, where the hypervisor reclaims memory from running VMs if it can.

By definition, a cloud can oversell easily.

Any major provider won't touch it with a ten foot pole. Why? Because they know it's completely unreliable and fails more often than not. Stay far far away from this.

So not sure what you can 'oversell' in the traditional model of 'dump all the customers onto the server and let them 'fight' for resources' and 'sell the same GB of ram to 100 people', for example>?
No, but *most* cloud providers are overselling the cpu capability dozens of times over - which in many instances is worse for the user

No, but *most* cloud providers are overselling the cpu capability dozens of times over - which in many instances is worse for the user

No, they're not.

No, but *most* cloud providers are overselling the cpu capability dozens of times over - which in many instances is worse for the user

we (OnApp) have setup more than 100 clouds for webhosting companies now, and you are right, some web hosting companies oversell on the CPU, but not at all at the magnitude you mention above. I haven't seen anyone doing more than 50% overallocation on CPU - and typically there is no overallocation at all.

:)
D

Why is that? Virtualization exists for years now. Cloud is just clustered and metered, and well.... Google decided to promote the world "cloud" like something amazingly new and impressive. I like the CEO of Oracle when he makes fun about cloud.

Clustered services, even SAN storage has existed for years, the metered model may be somehow new.

As you suspect, even metering is not new.

The old phrases to look up from the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s were "time share" and "service bureau".

A company would rent a slice of a mainframe, or mainframe cluster from IBM themselves, or a service bureau which owned a similar facility.

The vendor would present you with a bill that charged for storage, storage access, machine cycles, printing, etc.

Some consultants made a fortune helping companies to reduce their metered usage in return from a percentage of the ongoing savings achieved.

The difference was that these operations routinely ran with downtime that was caused only by truly scheduled maintenance. That is, scheduled maintenance that was announced in advance, and carefully planned. One particular company, like many in the retail sector, only had a single restart once a year in November. That restart date was picked to coincide with the preparation for the Christmas rush.

Similar operations exist and existed on HP, SUN, and DEC hardware.

So, nothing is really new other than the marketing. Some of the old stuff is actually miles ahead of anything seen on the internet.

There are some very interesting SUN boxes that seem tailored to run web services on. But, we never see them.

As you suspect, even metering is not new.

The old phrases to look up from the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s were "time share" and "service bureau".

A company would rent a slice of a mainframe, or mainframe cluster from IBM themselves, or a service bureau which owned a similar facility.

The vendor would present you with a bill that charged for storage, storage access, machine cycles, printing, etc.

Some consultants made a fortune helping companies to reduce their metered usage in return from a percentage of the ongoing savings achieved.

The difference was that these operations routinely ran with downtime that was caused only by truly scheduled maintenance. That is, scheduled maintenance that was announced in advance, and carefully planned. One particular company, like many in the retail sector, only had a single restart once a year in November. That restart date was picked to coincide with the preparation for the Christmas rush.

Similar operations exist and existed on HP, SUN, and DEC hardware.

So, nothing is really new other than the marketing. Some of the old stuff is actually miles ahead of anything seen on the internet.

There are some very interesting SUN boxes that seem tailored to run web services on. But, we never see them.

I agree, its not new - and I so so so wish that the whole 'cloud' concept would go away so we could get on with our business, and help web hosts building good reliable platforms...cloud or not.

It's honestly not helping anyone, ask 50 techies what a cloud is, and you'll get 100 answers.

At some stage, hopefully soon, what we call cloud now will just be the way stuff is done. And the whole fluffy thing will go away.

:)
D

Cloud is not magic, but it is an advanced set of tools and particularly intelligent set of hardware to achieve things that otherwise could not be achieved in a traditional environment.


"cloud" is currently being implemented on commodity hardware. So, what "intelligent" hardware are you getting on about?

Anything you are buying is available to everyone. And they can absolutely guarantee access to their full resources by having their own admins install their os+apps in their own data centers or in colocation space. Furthermore, they can tune their resources to their specific use case without the impediments of any intervening restrictions.

Web 2.oh-oh may be mesmerised by cloudiness, but not the companies with really big spends. The ones who can completely fill a cage, suite, floor, or data center with their own equipment. The ones who will be around next year.

That probably wasn't the best choice of words to state intelligent hardware.. but more so intelligently chosen hardware. Ie: design and architect a Cloud carefully based on the need of that Cloud. Some will have more CPU density, some IO, some RAM, some network and inter-connectivity (ie: InfiniBand vs gigE).

If people are putting their own stuff in their own Data Center's, then they're not doing business with over 90% of providers here as we're IaaS providers and not concerned about that. Beyond that, I'm not quite sure I understand where you are going with your statement. In customers that are large enough to admin or choose their own Private Cloud, why wouldn't they? With the benefits it offers over stand-alone installations it's a no brainer for most companies looking to buy, and not spend the time and money into figuring out ways to turn their current infrastructure's into a Cloud capable SaaS (so they don't have to use Cloud based IaaS).

To be honest discussing this is a bit non sense. We cannot know if a company oversells their cloud or not. Cant it be done? Of course it can, physically it can be done, there is no doubt about it. Is it done? Probably not right now. CPUs this days are huge in power, overselling a bit of CPU is probably not doing any harm. In the future people will have benchmarks of the clouds available (they do now) so you will for sure know how much horse power and speed (performance) you get on each cloud that will trow the ones that are heavily oversold to the ground (or not).

This are all mere speculations. I would be more worried about I/O access, because CPUs are huge and RAM is cheap this days. Well if you use ECC registered, good brands its actually not that cheap but I would be worried about overselling network and storage more than CPU and RAM.

Im sure more clouds today are actually undersold. Cloud is run like someone said mostly on commodity hardware, its nothing special, some are using their huge old servers hardware they had not sold for it. So it can be oversold like anything. Software is never going to make magic if hardware cannot keep up.

But currently I would say most clouds are undersold, this will change in the future. It changed with the rest as well, shared hosting, servers, colo, etc, so why would cloud not keep the same trend of unlimited and overselling?

Just my 2 cents.

Overselling CPU does do harm. Ballooning Xen is completely unstable and is not worth the risk. We can know if a Cloud host oversells just by asking them.

RAM isn't all that cheap in high-end installations as you noted. Our Westmere Cloud we just built large fast sticks of a certified ECC Registered RAM were far from cheap.

You may be right thought about the future that new trends will open up and unlimited and overselling could eventually happen. Although I do hope unlimited doesn't happen.. that just really sounds like a can of worms until there is real memory sharing available in technology to span a single instance beyond one physical server.